You want your WordPress powered site to rank well, right? Like most site owners you have probably read dozens of blogs, and more “Top 10 SEO tips for WordPress”, or perhaps “Must Have WordPress Plugins” posts than you care to remember. The only problem is that many of these articles just say you have to install the plugins, not how to use them. I’ll admit that I am as much at fault as anyone else. Here’s the problem; while some plugins require little or no configuration, and even less on-going attention – All in one SEO pack is not one of them. Miss a check box or ignore a field and you could be doing more harm than good – your site rankings could drop faster than Wile E. Coyote holding an Acme umbrella.

This post will be updated from time-to-time when there are significant updates to the plugin. Items that are new to this post will be bolded. Additionally, I’ll mark items that could be detrimental to your rankings with a caution sign.

Updated on 3/1/2013 – The version currently being covered is 1.6.15.3.

Update: 1/23/2015 – This article is no longer being updated. It still provides a good reference for many of the settings, but is not all-inclusive.

There were several small updates between 1.6.12.2 and 1.6.15.3, most were bug fixes or new language implementations. The big improvement is the addition of Google Plus integration, which is more important than you might think. If you’re not yet familiar with Google AuthorRank and the “rel=author” tag, I have a couple places should check out; Ann Smarty’s slideshare, she has some really good stuff. Jill Whalen has a good post explaining more about what “rel=author” is and why you should be using it. Lastly, you can watch a video of Google’s Matt Cutts talking about AuthorRank.

Version 1.6.12.2 bug fixes for people running older versions of WordPress.

Version 1.6.12 added support for custom WordPress post types.

Version 1.6.11.1 minor some bug fixes.

Version 1.6.11 adds a language update, some bug fixes and code optimization.

Version 1.6.8.2 contained some unknown updates so that it was compatible WordPress.2.9, also the developer introduced a “pro” version that is available for purchase. As far as I can see the there are no functional differences between the two versions. The pro version seems to intended for use by hosting companies and consultants who do not want the donation request displayed on the configuration pages of their clients’ sites.

I am disappointed to say that the author of this tag seems to have less and less time for answering questions and communicating with the millions of people that have made his tag so popular. As a former web application developer, I know first-hand it is a time-consuming and seemingly thankless job. I cannot fault the author for wanting to make some money with a “pro” version. However, I completely disagree with how he has done it. Monthly charges for upgrades is, in my opinion, crazy for this “software”. I donated before the pro version existed, and I am sure that many others would gladly pay for this wonderful tag if not for the monthly fees. According to the WordPress.org plugins directory, it’s been downloaded more than 5,000,000 times. Lets all send him a dollar so we can get rid of the monthly fees and he can hire a team to maintain the tool while he sits on the beach…how about it folks?.

All in one SEO Pack Configuration – site settings

From within your WordPress admin, go to the settings area, then select “All in one SEO”. There are a lot of options here, but don’t feel intimidated, we’ll walk through most of them.

Plugin Status

With each new update, the developer has chosen to disable the plugin. Presumably, this forces you to review the settings each time, and hopefully avoid any surprises. You’ll need to enable it after you install and again after each update.
Obviously, if you neglect to enable the plugin after an upgrade, you can expect some issues with your rankings.

Home Title

As its name implies, this is where you provide the page title for the “home” of your web site, leave this blank and word press defaults to the site name you defined in your WordPress configuration.
According to the SEOMoz.org SEO Ranking factors survey, page titles are one of the most important factors. Entering a bad, or blank title will cause problems for your rankings.

Home Description

This box provides the Content for the meta-description tag. Leave this one blank and WordPress does not even give you a description tag. That is bad, be sure to fill this in with a proper site description.
Page/Post meta descriptions were also included in the ranking survey, but at a lower level. Ignoring or misusing this could impact how well you perform in search results.

Home Keywords
(comma separated)

Even though use of the meta-keywords tag has been degraded over the years, it is still an important part of an overall SEO plan. Add carefully selected keywords here. Leave this blank and WordPress does not add the meta-keywords tag to your page. For best results, place your primary keywords in the front of the list.

Canonical URLS

This newly added feature is enabled by default – leave it that way. If you are not familiar with canonical URLs, and would like to be – read this Google webmaster blog post. For the rest of you, just know that this feature helps avoid duplicate content issues with the major search engines. That’s a good thing.
Duplicate content is a serious issue. Google has said they are less concerned with same site duplication, and are working to understand it better, but they do recommended the use of this tag.

Rewrite Titles

If set, all page, post, category, search and archive page titles get rewritten. You can specify the format for most of them (as shown below). For example: The default templates puts the title tag of posts like this: “Blog Category >> Blog Name >> Post Title”. That would be considered anti-SEO. With the default settings, Rewrite Title rewrites: “Post Title | Blog Name”.
The default behavior of WordPress titles is very anti-seo, use this setting to correct it.

Post Title Format
(other titles too)

Each of the six Title format boxes allow you to customize how the titles are displayed in the various parts of the site. On sites I maintain, I leave all but the Post setting alone. On each of those I insert a few VERY carefully selected keywords (or synonyms). Doing this ensures those keywords are part every title.
You may be tempted to stuff your titles with keywords. Don’t, it will backfire on you.

Search Title Format

This field is confusingly named. It actually has nothing to do with the search engines. Instead, this relates to the results page of your local/site search.

Description Format

There are a four automated formats available for the setting. The default is the best one, leave this one alone.

404 Title Format

The box sets the page title for your 404 (page not found) error pages.

Paged Format

Leave this one alone.

SEO for Custom Post Types

WordPress 3.0 introduced the ability to create your own custom post types. If you have created one (or more) and want AIOSEO to be enabled for them, check this box. If not, leave it uncehecked. If you are curious about custom post types, you can read more on the WordPress.org Custom Post Types pages.

Custom Post Types for SEO Column Support

You’ll use this box to list the types of posts you want to have AIOSEO information displayed for while viewing your listings, by default it already includes “posts” and “pages”. If you’ve created a custom post type and want it to have access to the All In One SEO Pack features, be sure and list it here. Unless you really, really dont want to have AIOSEO used on your be careful you don’t delete the default information.

Google Plus Profile Sitewide Default

Enter your Google Plus Profile URL here to link your site’s pages to Google Plus.If you’re not already familiar with the how & why of the “rel=author” tag, you really should do some research – start with the links I included above. In a nutshell, by creating a valid Google Plus profile for your self, and then linking your posts to that profile you might get yourself a little snazzier listing in the Google search results, and I’ve heard people say they believe this will be included as a ranking factor.

The default (and most common) method of using Google Analytics is on a single domain, or website. However, there are occasionally times when it is useful to track your visitors across multiple domains. If you’re cusrious about how to do this, check out the “Tracking Multiple Domains” page on the Google Support website.If you have you have completed all the required steps to do this, click this check box to enable it.

Track Outbound Links:

In the standard configuration, links that lead away from your site are not automatically tracked by Google Analytics. Without the AIOSEO plugin you would need to insert some JavaScript into your pages and manually tag all outbound links you want to track. Thankfully, it’s now as simple as checking this box.You should know that turning on this feature will introduce a fraction of a second delay from the time your visitor clicks a link until the time the activity actually happens. According to Google, the delay will hardly be noticable.

Use Categories for META keywords

If you are hyper-careful and strategic about your category names, go ahead and use this. If you are like the rest of us, leave this one alone and add your keywords manually for each post.

Use Tags for META keywords

If you are thoughtful and strategic about your tag names, go ahead and use this as it could save you some time as you create new posts. Checking this causes the tags you set for a given post to be used as the META keywords for that post. You can also manually add additional words as you normally would as well. Just be careful not to duplicate them.

Dynamically Generate Keywords for Posts Page

If you have changed the default setting of WordPress and the listing of of your posts is somewhere other than your default/home page then this option determines if you want the keywords for that page set dynamically (based on all the posts listed) or if they should be manually entered. I suggest you do it manually.

Use noindex for…

There are three of these boxes, ensure each one is selected. This tells the search engines to not index these areas of your site. This is another method minimizing duplicate content risks.
If this is not used, you are allowing the engines to index the same content, but at multiple URLs. This is duplicate content, and it’s bad.UPDATE: If you are correctly using the canonical tag, this is almost a non-issue now. I say almost for two reasons. 1) While BING does recognize the canonical tag, they are a bit more picky about it than Google is and it’s possible they wont trust your implementation of it. Even though Bing currently has a small(er) piece of the search engine traffic, you don’t want to risk making things worse for yourself in the future. 2) Google likes it when you help them move faster. By telling them they don’t need to index something it allows them to move through the rest of your site more quickly.

Autogenerate Descriptions

Enabling this feature will tell SEO pack to automagically generate META descriptions for your posts using the first 150 characters of your article. If you are a content rock star and always get your keywords in the first sentence, then this will work great for you. The plugin will look first to see if you set one manually on the post before auto-generating one. Since most of us are note content rock stars, it’s generally safer to enter descriptions manually on each post.I have this feature enabled to save me a few seconds when I occasionally post articles that I don’t care if they rank or not. It’s also a nice safety net for when I just plain forget to do it.NOTE: We’ll discuss further down how/where to enter your post and page descriptions.

Capitalize Category Titles

This is a bit of a mystery. Check this and page titles, of category pages with will have the first letter of each word capitalized.Other than for visual appeal, I (and several fellow SEOs I checked with) can think of no reason to do this. Google’s Matt Cutts, shared with me “Google tends to ignore upper vs. lowercase. But certainly users respond to the differences quite a bit.”The default behavior of WordPress is to use the text you enter as the category title, as the page title as well, if you want initial caps in one, wouldn’t you want it in both?

My recommendation is if you want titles like this, enter them this way and leave this unchecked to save a few processor clicks.

Exclude Pages

Pages listed here will not be processed by the all in one seo pack. This is usefully if you have other, non-WordPress, dynamic content running on your site.

Additional Headers

There are three of these boxes. Text entered here will be added to the head section of your pages. These are useful if you need to add meta validation for webmaster tools. If you use these, use with caution. These are not required for basic SEO practices.

Log Important Events

This is a troubleshooting tool from the developer. If checked and a significant event (No, I have no idea what that would be) happens, it’ll be logged.

All in one SEO Pack Configuration – post settings

When creating a new post you’ll want to scroll to the bottom of your post editing page to the All in one SEO Pack section. There you will see the following four options.

Title

You can optionally enter a page title here, if left blank SEO Pack will use the post’s title. If you are attempting to rank in a competitive market (who isn’t) entering an alternate title here allows you to make use of additional keywords or synonyms. Don’t stuff keywords here, you will regret it. Also, the closer your primary keyword is to the beginning, the better.
According to the 2009 SEOMoz.org SEO Ranking factors survey, page titles are one of the most important factors. Entering a bad, or blank title will cause problems for your rankings.

Description

This is the META-description for the post. Carefully craft these as search engines consider them in ranking and display them in results. SEO Pack shows a counter as you type letting you know how close you are to the recommended 160 character limit. Try to get strongest key word/phrase as close to the front as possible.
Page/Post meta descriptions were also included in the ranking survey, but at a lower level. Ignoring or misusing this could impact how well you perform in search results.

Keywords

This is the META-keywords for the post. As mentioned above, use of the keywords tag has been degraded over the years, but it is still used by some engines. Put your most important ones closer to the front.

Disable on this
page/post

If for some reason you wish to NOT use the SEO pack on a page, check this box.

All in one SEO Pack Configuration – page settings

When creating a new page, be sure to update the All in one SEO pack settings, found near the bottom of the editing screen. Page settings are almost identical to the post settings, with just one additional option – menu label.

Title

You can optionally enter a page title here, if left blank SEO Pack will use the WordPress page title. Remember, entering an alternate title here allows you to make use of additional keywords or synonyms. Don’t stuff keywords here, you will regret it. Also, the closer your primary keyword is to the beginning, the better.
According to the 2009 SEOMoz.org SEO Ranking factors survey, page titles are one of the most important factors. Entering a bad, or blank title will cause problems for your rankings.

Description

This is the META-description for the page. Carefully craft these as search engines consider them in ranking and display them in results. SEO Pack shows a counter as you type letting you know how close you are to the recommended 160 character limit. Try to get strongest key word/phrase as close to the front as possible.
Page/Post meta descriptions were also included in the ranking survey, but at a lower level. Ignoring or misusing this could impact how well you perform in search results.

Keywords

This is the META-keywords for the page. As mentioned above, use of the keywords tag has been degraded over the years, but it is still used by some engines. Put your most important ones closer to the front.

Title Attribute

Text you enter here will become the link title text for links to this page. Link titles appear when you hover over a link. The affect they have on ranking is debatable, but it’s minimal at best. This is more of a usability feature as it allows you to provide additional information about the link. Link titles can add a nice touch if used correctly.

Menu Label

The sets the text used in your site menus for this page, left blank it will be the same as the WordPress page title.
Link anchor text is a VERY powerful SEO tool, use this carefully. This can help a lot, or hurt you badly.

Disable on this page/post

If for some reason you wish to NOT use the SEO pack on a page, check this box.

What are you waiting for?

There you have it, all the info you need to configure your All In One SEO Pack and get your page rankings climbing. This plugin makes it easy for anyone to optimize their WordPress blog posts and pages for better search engine placement.

Jack this is a good post on the All in One SEO plug-in. Definitely a must have plug-in.

You mention in the beginning of your post there were a few things where this plug in could hurt your rankings. In reading the post I see you have some wisdom about stuffing keywords into titles and such. Are there any BIGGER gotchas? Perhaps you could put them in RED and bold or something.

thanks for a great post – I tried to find this info on the official Plugin Support Forum, to no avail. I figured out the new post/page bits (Title Attribute & Menu Label) but all the “stuff” on the main page – canonical URLs etc. – had me a little baffled, so this is a clear concise “how to” – thanks!!

This is an awesome post. It should be attached to the download for the All in One SEO pack.

Your recommendation on “Dynamically Generate Keywords for Posts Page” is very important. You do want to do this manually otherwise you have no idea what keywords are being dynamically generated. Unfortunately, I found this out after looking at the Google Webmasters Tools for my site.

Now that I’ve unchecked it, I wonder if it goes back and updates all the posts I’ve made to remove those unwanted keywords. Some of them look like gibberish. I’m not sure if this helps or hurts, but it looks bad in Webmasters Tools at least.

Best – no. Acceptable, yes. You are the best judge of what the strongest possible, keyword inclusive description of your pages is. Any automated process is just a “best guess”. For day-to-day posts, auto-generate is fine, for posts you really want to do well, create your own.

I printed your tips on AIO SEO in LARGE type on laminated paper, and have them hanging above my desk. They have been a big help in learning this “Black Art” of SEO.

Thanks for your efforts

32

Steve Grundleger //

I ditto all the nice comments to you. Very helpful.

One thing I am trying to understand is the purpose of the formats. I am working on improving my permalinks for both readability and SEO. I think the post, page, category, etc formats are in place of the usual wordpress options for creating/managing permalinks. Is this correct? or am I on the wrong path?

Steve – the various “formats” within All in One are not related to perma-links. They effect page titles etc, which by default come from your post titles and almost always could be modified to be a little stronger.

34

DJ Morris //

Great article…it answered all the questions I had regarding the SEO pack. I love how you laid it all out in order which made it very easy to follow and understand :).

Sorry – I am not aware of a problem. My site and several others I know are using the plugin all seem to be fine. Are you sure it’s an AIO issue and not WordPress or your theme?

46

Herit Shah //

@Jack Leblond

As a site owner, i think i should inform you about a plugin which is 99X more powerful than AIOSEOP, title rewriting and meta things are like penny for it. it has 77 more features than aioseop..just see yourself, in my previous entry i told you about bug in the aioseop and its true with many other people..so i hope u should upgrade to this plugin. http://www.wpseo.org. do tell me how u like it…and whether i should apply this to all my wordpress site??

Just because something does more, does not make it better. In fact, by adding all these extra “features” it’s quite possible that they are doing more harm than good. Google has made it clear that page load time is, or will become a factor in ranking. Each plugin you add, and each process it must perform slows your site a little bit more. I looked at the link you provided and can see no reason why anyone should pay for that plugin.

in my admin there is the field “description format” that can by default used with
* %description% – The original description as determined by the plugin, e.g. the excerpt if one is set or an auto-generated one if that option is set.
* %blog_title% – The title of your blog.
* %blog_description% – The description/tagline of your blog.

I now want also use %tag%, %post_title% and %page_title% within in the description format?? how can I use these “macros” addiotionally??

Please explain me in detail how to get this work as I am very new in coding stuff ;-)

I don’t know if you can use AIO like that, even if you could I would recommend you didn’t. Tags and titles have a place of their own and stuffing your description with them *could* be viewed as spammy by the search engines.

@Herit, thanks a lot for your great review about wpSEO, we are glad that our users notice the difference to other Plugins.

@Jack, you are right! More features doesn’t mean it is better. But all features are SEO relevant, we try to keep wpSEO slim and lean, the execution time is very fast. We would love if you test wpSEO and let us know how you like it. You can download the Plugin at wpseo.org and use it for 10 days for free.

I just wanted to tell you thank you for taking the time to prepare this document. It is a critical part of my working successfully with the All in one SEO Pack Configuations. My mentor even thanked me for sharing the information. Following your information, I am getting top ranking immediately on lesser ranked keywords sometimes within an hour from google. Since my site is new, it is wonderful. I am monitoring my rise through more competitive keywords, so I will see how it works there over a bit more time.

57

sonia //

All in one seo pack is a extraordinary plugin,thanks for such a high level infromation,I was searching it…

Thank you so much for your post! I couldn’t figure out why Google was ignoring my customized meta description tags I was creating with the All in one SEO Pack, and instead was using the first sentence of my blog posts in the search results. Turns out I had “Dynamically Generate Keywords for Posts Page” selected, and I hadn’t even realized it. So thank you for this comprehensive walkthrough!

Best,
Diana (Twitter: @dianafreedman)

59

Jim Kernan //

Nice post here. Very helpful on all of the categories, very comprehensive.

Thanks so much for this post. I am a Personal Trainer in San Diego and competing with all the other trainers s crazy. Now I am #1 for San Diego Muay Thai, #1 for San Diego Bodybuilding, #1 for San Diego Boxing. Quick question. I was #2 for San Diego Personal Trainer and the next day I was gone. Not even in the top 10 pages. It happened again with me at #2 and now I’m gone. I though I might have got penalized for something but I am still #1 on all the others. Thanks for any help. Hank Butler, Owner of Train With Hank San Diego Personal Training

This guide on how to set your All in one SEO pack configuration was the most helpful document I found about this subject. It was even better than the developers help. Thanks again! It has helped me to get instant recognition on articles, but more important, I am achieving google ranking now. Thanks Jack!

64

Dan //

OK, done as you suggested. A few questions.

1) With my theme (Bueno, customised), each post has a custom field of “seo_follow” with attribute “false” automatically. What is this?

2) How do I manually add keywords to a post? I don’t see the option, yet the plugin is definitely enabled…

Dan,
I downloaded bueno and dug through it’s code, the “seo_follow” setting controls whether or not links from your pages are “no follow” or “do follow.” If they are set to “no follow” that tells the search engines to not follow the link. This is a good idea for comments, not so much for content. I’d suggest leaving it as “false.”

To manually add keywords, you need to edit the post, then scroll near the bottom of the page. You should see a section labeled “All in One SEO Pack.” It’s possible that yours is collapsed and all you see is the gray bar – if so, just click the arrow at the right side of the bar to open it.

66

Dan //

Hi Jack – thanks for your efforts and reply! Just one question.

You said,

“I downloaded bueno and dug through it’s code, the “seo_follow” setting controls whether or not links from your pages are “no follow” or “do follow.” If they are set to “no follow” that tells the search engines to not follow the link. This is a good idea for comments, not so much for content. I’d suggest leaving it as “false.”

But if seo_follow is set to “false” as default, doesn’t that set the “seo_follow” to “no follow”?

Good catch – you are (probably) correct. I hate PHP code. I looked too quickly at the “!=” and forgot it means “not equal”.

However, without doing a full code trace, I’m now not 100% sure. The code is like this: ‘seo_follow’,true) != ‘true’) { $follow = ‘nofollow’; } The double use of “true” makes me wonder which way it is being set. However, an easy test would be to create a link in one of your posts to an external site, and view the source code of the link with it set both ways and see what it creates.

68

Dan //

So… should I leave it to “false”? That is the default, and besides, might it clash with the SEO Pack?

Finally, I have heard good things about the Thesis theme, do you know about this?

I am doing a new website with yamidoo Pro, very similar to Yamidoo, which I used for http://www.brainwaving.com – another very customised WP site.

Many thanks for this article. I wasn’t getting much joy on the developer’s forum but found a link to here, and this has been a huge help for a newbie to SEO. I’m going through my site at the moment and at least I can now feel as if I understand some, if not all. Thanks again.

Odd – there seems to be no difference between them. I’d suggest contacting the theme author for advice. Sorry I couldn’t do more for you.

74

Caroline //

Not being an SEO pro, there is one thing I’m finding confusing: I am a careful “tagger” so have selected “Use Tags for META keywords”. Are these META keywords different from the ones that are dynamically generated, or manually entered, in individual posts?

Caroline,
First, the dynamically generated keywords option is only used in very unique situations and it has no affect on individual pages and/or posts.

As for the other three sources for keywords – be careful. Generally, but not always, AIOSEO will combine the contents of the three places it can get keywords, if you tell it to use them all. For example, if you have told it to use both categories and tags as keywords, and you also manually enter them on the edit page, AIOSEO will take all three and make one list of keywords. This could be good or bad. If you have used “web graphics” as both a category and a tag, and you also add it to your manual list, you *might* end up with it listed in your meta keywords three times. I say MIGHT because it appears that AIESEO does do some checking and tries to keep the list clean, but in my (albeit limited) testing it still lets some duplicates get through.

After that long explanation, I have to add that as of today, no search engine claims to use meta keywords for ranking.

Good question! As near as I can tell, the only difference us in the pro version you don’t have ads in your admin pages and I think you get notified sooner about updates. If you host your own sites, I see no reason to pay for the pro version. However, I would reccomend you donate some money to the developer.

So glad I found this post — it’s the first one that I’ve seen that actually addresses not just what the AIOSEO options mean, but how to use them and why! Still a few things I’m fuzzy on, but that’s okay too. Thank you for taking the time to address what the creators of the plugin have not!

I’d be thrilled if you can answer the following question on the ‘no index’ options:

Background: I like to create mini sites (usually only a few pages of content, not including the standard ‘about us’ etc pages) where my primary content and optimization for my primary key phrase is all on one page. Thus, I set the frontpage/homepage in WP to be a static page and use the page of unique content I referenced above for that purpose. I may also add additional pages which are specifically optimized around a different (though related) key phrase. Of course, the problem with this approach is that I cant add content to my pages via posts (since they’re not displayed on the static page and get their own pages via permalinks) in order to keep the content fresh…but that’s a separate issue I believe…

Question: So, given the approach above, would you still suggest using no-index for Categories, Archives and Tags? The instructions I’ve seen in the past always say to allow indexing on the Categories and I’m just not clear on what the advantage or disadvantage of doing this would be.

If I do use Posts to add content to a site (which I would do mainly to increase the breadth of the site so as to keep visitors there longer and to not appear to Google to be a ‘thin site’), I would want those pages – i call them pages because of the permalinks – to be indexed, though I dont care how well they rank. In that case, does using the no-index options prevent the POSTS from being indexed, or would the post pages be indexed anyway (and just not the actual tag or category pages)?

I’m not sure I fully understand how you are doing what you are doing – but I’m pretty sure you are doing it wrong. Is your front page/home page not part of WordPress? It should be. You can configure WP so that it leaves one page as the “home”. This allows you to have the “static” front you want, but still have the proper navigation for indexing.

As for the “no index” setting, assuming you are using the canonical tag option correctly, it’s less important now to use “no index” than it was in the past.

Hope this helps. If not, I can perform a site review and provide more detailed assistance.

Hi Jack,
thank you for this useful information about this great plugin for WP. As I just started to implement it on my blog I find those “step by step” explanations very useful.

Thanks a lot!

Alek

81

Dean //

Thanks for clarifying this plug in functions. Been using for some time, never really knew what I should check and not check.

Quick question, all of a sudden in google my home page is showing a “|” then title {only half my title}when i google it. Also, it doesn”t pull the all in one seo description I have put in. Any idea why it is doing that?
Thanks for any help
Dean

82

Derek //

Thanks for the article. The problem I am having with the plugin is that I don’t want my site name to show up at the end of my post titles. How do I do this? I have it set to %post_title%.

I’ve tried to get an answer to this on the wordpress.org forums, the all in one seo forum, but no one even replies. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

It’s possible that your theme has the site name hard-coded so that it always appears. You should review the PHP and see what you can discover. Good luck.

84

Will //

This is great… I have been looking for an in-depth explanation of the features for this plugin, and your post does just that. Maybe the plugin’s author should drop some cash your way for documentation! ;-)

Thanks for this informative article. I know that the keywords field is no longer too important; but I still want to pop in some appropriate keywords. What’s an ideal number of keywords, without overdoing it?

Researching keyword anchor tags dashes appear to be prefered over underscored between words. Do you concur?

Thanks again for posting such great information. My rank was, then it looked like they were starting to go down again. I am now testing what happens to my stats after making a few changes following your instructions.

I’m toying around with the seo on my site, many people recommend different things. One thing I have heard is to not bother listing keywords as you are just giving it away to your competition and google ignores them anyway.

As of this week none of the engines “officially” use the meta keywords. However, there are some who believe they still play a minor role in helping the engines decide what your site is be about. As for your competition using it to know what you are trying to rank for – if that’s all they look at (or you work on) there are much bigger concerns.

This is really great info. I have used the SEO pack for quite some time but never realized what each of the configuration setting were for like the canonical urls and the no index options. Thanks for posting this, it really helps me to get the best out my seo pack.

I have been looking for this information for quite some time.
Have printed it off to refer to for my websites and update them.
A little more reading over the information will be needed on my part to fully understand the points.

Could you help me with a question around duplication? I get the message that it’s bad, but on a blog post with a fairly narrow theme, let’s say “SEO for music blogs” where i’ve already added categories and tags, and set up the keywords at Blog level, it looks to me as though i’d be adding more or less the same words again in the Title and Description fields at the post level. In fact, the Title and Description would also be pretty much identical.

Would this result in duplication and therefore be harmful to rankings? Or have I misunderstood some aspect of what goes in the boxes and what Google et al do with it?!
TIA, Kate

Kate,
the issue of “duplicate content” relates to the content of your pages, not the title or meta tags. However – none of your pages should ever have the same title. Also, since search engines mostly ignore meta tags having duplicates there is not a huge deal, but from their perspective it may look as though you are trying to spam them. Take the time to create legitimately unique content, titles and tags – you’ll be glad you did.

Thank you very much Jack for this well elaborated post. I have been using the plugin for months but never really payed much attenton to the settings- i’d ad the meta tags and done. I am now looking to improve the SEO of my site and having the correct settings of AIOSEO is probably very important. Reading your article has made me make a few changes I’m sure will help.

Thanks a lot!

103

Gordon //

Hi, I am using the All in One pack 1.6.12.2 and I’ve set it up as you advised above. I am also using this with Jeff Johnson’s traffic getting plugin.

I have a brand new site and after a week or so one of my pages is ranking page 3 in Google for one of my target keywords. Not bad for no link building yet, only on-page optimisation. The thing is, the Google listing is showing the first couple of lines of body text from the page as the description, not what I entered into the Description box in the All in One section of the page admin area. When I view the source code in my browser I see:

Then lower down, still in the Head section, I see the start of the All in One code:

Is it normal to see two sets of meta tags, and is the All in One supposed to override it? Could it be that the WP theme I’m using (Parallelus) is creating the top set of tags?

This is a really great blog optimization resource! I’ve included it in a recent blog post of mine entitled: “Essential WordPress Installation, Optimization & Security Resources”.

The All in One SEO Plugin can be a tad intimidating to new users, and the outline you’ve posted is really handy to share with my clients and contacts. Saves me time and gives them a one-stop resource they can visit anytime they wish.

Thanks, and keep up the killer resources!

109

Sandra //

I have installed SEO All in One Pack. There is a link on my wordpress dashboard that says “All in One SEO Pack must be configured. Go to the admin page to enable and configure the plugin”.

When I click the highlighted link to the admin page, I get an error message that the page does not exist. I can see it does in my ftp site, and I can see the aioseop.php page it is looking for, but I have no idea what to do next.

Sandra,
On the right-hand menu of your WordPress admin, scroll down and click on “settings”, you should have an option then for the All In One SEO Pack. If not, go back to your plugins menu and deactivate & remove it. Log out.

Now, log back in and try to add it again.

Good luck!

111

Zakir //

Good article. I successfully configured the seo pack and hopes something good gonna come up from search engines!

I have this all set up and seems to work perfectly except . I add my own title info for each page, but it doesn’t show up on the page when you view source. It seems to me that WP puts in a default title. Do you know why and how I can get it to recognize my own tag? Tks for such a great article!

Thanks a lot for All in One Place Descriptions of All in One SEO Pack features. I spent couple hours trying to find what Title Attribute and Menu Label inputs are for. Now I’ll be using this page for future references. Thanks again. Eddie

Jack – thanks for this article! As a beginner, I have been struggling to make sense out of this plugin and your instructions and explanation of each field made it much more accessible! QUESTION: Before I installed AIOSEOP all my WP pages/posts had the checkboxes with noindex, noarchive and nofollow options. Now, I do not see nofollow option anywhere. Where can I set “nofollow” while using All in One SEO plugin? Thank you very much!!

I recently switched to the AIOSEO from the Platinum SEO. When I fill in the “additional headers” in the setup page, the text actually shows up at the top of my screen. Anyway to keep these descriptions for meta use but hide from view? Great post BTW.

Stephanie – under normal circumstances, the “additional headers” should not create viewable content, it’s intended for creating some “hidden” text that is only viewable in the code. This is useful if you must include a validation code for a service you are using. It’s just a guess, but it’s possible that your theme is doing something that is causing them to show.

Hi All, Any one can help me. I m using all-in-one-seo-pack
in WordPress MU. I m facing problem with “Menu Label” I entered
different menu label text in “Menu Label” field, but it is not
changing in front-end.

Thanks for this, it’s exactly what I was looking for and
very worthy of the number one spot from my Google search. You know
what you’re doing. It’s funny how one little check box can have all
this effect on your hard work.

Thank you, Thank you. I need all the help I can get so you’ve saved me another headache.

132

Jay //

wanted to leave you a note in thanks for this post. Like many I suspect, I have had no little trouble in determining the “right” settings for AIOESO and was never sure that I wasn’t doing more harm than good.

I have now adjusted my settings to match your suggestions and have begun to see a positive result in both the number of visitors, as well as in my rankings.

I came to this page because I thought it was a list of possible fixes for AIOESO problems. I just installed this plugin and have discovered two things – 1) – there’s zero help in its support forum, and 2) I get odd names in the browser title bar, double names, and old descriptions I don’t even have anymore.

Doug – I agree, the creator’s pages is lacking. That’s one reason why I created this one.

As for your particular issues, there is of course no way to be sure without digging into your code and databases what’s going on, but if descriptions from before when you had AIOSEO installed suddenly show up, I suspect that the plugin is actually revealing a larger issue with your site – not causing one.

The first place I would look is for old post revisions and a corrupt set of database tables.

Good luck!

PS. If you haven’t yet, you really should post a question in the support forums on the developer’s site. They do check in from time-to-time.

Hi! Not sure that I fully understand your question, but it sounds like you may end up with your meta keywords being stuffed with duplicate words. Since the engines ignore this tag now it’s not a huge deal. However, why give them or anyone else a reason to think you are spammy?

138

Karen //

Hi Jack – Thanks for a great article. I have one question. The latest version has a field called Search Title Format in the AIOSEO set-up. I’m not clear on what this is?

I’ve been having problems getting my page titles and descriptions to appear in Google so have gone thorough your steps here to see what happens. But what about this new filed?

Jack, thanks for the reply. Are you speaking of the support forums on the developer’s own site? I am not satisfied with the Twenty Ten theme, but unfortunately I happen to be stuck with it. I know there’s a lot of garbage in the backend, but I don’t know squat about coding (I just draw stuff).

Maybe one of these days I can get a really nice them, like Headway! He he…

Here’s a better way to phrase my question: If “University Professor Job Description – College Teacher Tips” is the title of my blog post, should I put the key phrases “university professor job description” and “college teacher tips” in:

1) All in One’s SEO pack at the bottom of the post in WP?
2) my WordPress post tags?
3) Both?

In other words, is it duplication to use my key phrases in both the WP tags and the individual post’s SEO pack?

If you have your site set to use “tags” as meta keywords, and also fill in separate meta keywords, yes it *might* lead to duplications. However, I’ve done a little testing with AIOSEP and it actually does a decent (but not perfect) job of eliminating duplicate keywords in this situation. So you are probably safe. But like I mentioned before, the engines don’t use meta tags anyway.

Jackie, thanks again for all the helpful info. I do have one question: I see that whoever originally designed my company’s site installed the Headspace plug-in. I’ve now installed the All-In-One SEO pack. So now there’s more than one place to enter tags, etc. It sounds like duplicate tags, even tho the SEOs don’t really look at those, is not a good idea. Which of these 2 plug-ins is best? Sure appreciate your help!

Personally, I prefer All in one SEO, but others prefer headspace. They both work well. However, having both installed at once is a recipe for disaster. Pick ONE, get it configured and remove the other.

Thanks so much for this: great info. I heard the All In One SEO Pack recommended at a workshop, and after installing, found I had no idea what to do next. Again, many thanks.

149

Ian Goulding //

Hi Jack, each time I need a question answered about AIOSEP, and search on Google, your post comes up. I have referred back to it many times! Thanks so much, but I still have a question……sorry…just need to confirm something in my mind. The meta-keywords I add in AIOSEP for each post, do these override the post tags or are they one and the same or should I add some keywords into the AIOSEP and some different ones to the post tags? Sorry, just getting myself very confused!! And do either of them count at all. I understand from your post that at the very least I shouldn’t duplicate them?
Gosh, hope you can help.

The AIOSEO code does a pretty good job of merging the multiple places where can you set meta keywords so that you will hopefully not end up with duplicates. In my experiments I have seen it miss a few though, so it’s best that you avoid creating them on your own if you can help it. However, none of the major engines currently use meta keywords as a ranking factor.

Post Title Format
(other titles too) Each of the six Title format boxes allow you to customize how the titles are displayed in the various parts of the site. On sites I maintain, I leave all but the Post setting alone. On each of those I insert a few VERY carefully selected keywords (or synonyms). Doing this ensures those keywords are part every title.

Where do you insert the keywords on the individual page? Do you change the format of the All In One SEO template or are you just talking about each page?

The section you mention is on the main AIOSEO admin page. Keywords you enter there will be included in the page titles of ALL PAGES. If you wish to enter keywords on individual pages, you can also do that. Each page/post has an AIESEO section near the bottom of it’s edit screen. This is actually quite useful and recommended. You can use one phrase for the post title, and another for the page title, allowing you greater potential for your keywords to be discovered.

If I understand your comments on Post Title Format are you recommending that we eliminate”%post_title% | %blog_title%” in the Post Title Format text boxes and just add keywords in that box.?

Thanks for the clarity,
Joe
Post Title Format
(other titles too) Each of the six Title format boxes allow you to customize how the titles are displayed in the various parts of the site. On sites I maintain, I leave all but the Post setting alone. On each of those I insert a few VERY carefully selected keywords (or synonyms). Doing this ensures those keywords are part every title.

Where do you insert the keywords on the individual page? Do you change the format of the All In One SEO template or are you just talking about each page?

No, please DO NOT do that. However, if your site (and all it’s pages) are focused on a primary set of key words, you can add a few carefully chosen ones behind %post_title% and %page_title%.

159

Duncan //

Great article thanks..

I have searched my wordpress files in vain to find the actual files which hold the meta tags for title and discription so that I can manually amend them if needed. Where does SEO pack actually put the information?

I’m working on a new site with upgrades of All in One and Altahuapa and having a problem with the menu label that wasn’t happening before. All in one version 1.6.13.2, Atahualpa version 3.6.4, WP version 3.1. I can make it work by using tab name as title, but then I have a shortened tab name instead of a catchy title for page. Anyone know of a work around for this one?

I’m not familiar with the Altahuapa theme, but the developer’s site says it has SEO features built in, it’s possible that using AIOSEO with this theme provides unexpected results. You should check with the Altahuapa developers for more info.

Jack, thank you very much for the this post. Some great info and yes I have to agree with your sentiments about the developer spending less time supporting. The Pro version is great for him but I’m wondering about everyone else. I wonder how much support he received with the donation button. I did donate on my first install but not other ones (the explains the 5 million users).. I’ve seen some other folks move over to the Yoast SEO plug-in but I’ve stuck with All-in-one because I’ve used it for so long.

I have a question… first of all thanks for such a great article, I finally installed and activated the plugin sure of what to do with it. My question is… can ALL in one SEO work together with ALL in One Webmaster, or it will be kind of 2 plugins doing the same thing and potentially messing up what SEO is trying to do?

I’m not familiar with that plugin, but if it does all, or even some of the same things that All In One SEO does, it’s bound to cause problems and should probably be avoided. Find ONE SEO plugin you like, and use it and only it.

Hi Jack! I was so encouraged by your informative and practical advice. I did everything that you said on both of my sites, which are really the same site, one in English, and the other a translation into Hebrew. The ratings on the Hebrew site did fabulously. The ratings on the English site plummeted. My site went from 13 or 16 for my keywords to 63 and 44. I keep reviewing what you wrote, and what I did and I don’t have a clue what went wrong. I would so appreciate if you could shed any light on this for me. Thank you!!! Galia

Thanks for posting this article; very helpful. However, I’ve run into an issue with the plugin and would be extremely grateful if you could share any insights you may have into this:

I’ve got the Twenty Ten theme on my site and had been using the WP Tweet Button plugin for a little while before installing AIOSEO. When I installed AIOSEO, the Tweet counts reset to zero. I assumed they’d just start counting all over again from there – minorly annoying but not a big deal as my site is newish and there hadn’t been many tweets. But I’ve now tried tweeting a few things to my own Twitter account as I’d done before, and the Tweet counts from this didn’t survive the page being refreshed. They keep resetting to zero. No idea where to begin with this!

I can’t say for sure, as I’m not familiar with that plugin. However, if it uses the actual button from Twitter, but it may be URL related – the tweet counts are tied to specific URLs. The button from twitter has an option to enter a specific URL, if your plugin has that, try it and see if it works.

Hidden links are something that are only ever visible in the code of your site, and never on the regular pages. Your pages appear to have two of them – although I suspect they are accidental. One points to the wordpress twitter page, the other to your RSS feed. In your web browser, click “view” then “source code”. Anything enclosed by the tags named “nav-extra” is being hidden.

Thanks! Oddly (but fortunately) it seems to be working now…I guess there was just some kind of delay after I made changes.

179

Derek //

Hello Jack,

Love your post on All in One SEO pack. Had a question though… When im in my post editor (wordpress), i scroll to the bottom as you suggested and enter the fields, as you suggested. My problem is that there isn’t a “apply”,”update”, or similar option on the plugin itself, so i find the only way to “push enter” is to scroll back up to the “built in post editor” and push update. You can probably guess, nothing posts to my site, because i didn’t fill out any of the information in that section.

Do i have to fill the info in both sections (copy/paste)? Then push update in the built in post editor? When i check out my lists of posts “posts” under… “posts” it shows my SEO title and keywords, so i know its picking up the plugin things.

Im assuming that i have to do the (copy/paste) to both edit sections to actually post the ad to my site.

I would have provided a website for you, but i just started learning SEO and wordpress and the various plugins in the last week. My site is basically crap, right now. Nothing more than a few pages, very little content, and some non-default templates.

I’m sorry – I’m not understanding what you mean by “both sections”. If you are on the add/edit post page, you have fields for creating the actual post on the top, followed by a few miscellaneous fields, then the AIOSEO fields. There is only one submit/update button.

We are repeatedly advised to caption or label our photos and videos for seo…but I can never find the place or the way to do so, therefore my vids and photos aren’t doing any good in the seo arena….Of course I will have them anyway for the addition to the post, but it would be great if they also helped with seo.
Thanks in advance.

This is a great guide – first time I’ve installed/used it on a site and the how to use all in one seo steps were very helpful indeed, especially as I hadn’t noticed that scrolling down on post entry pages also gave the title/description/keywords option for that particular post.

I also just noticed seo_follow tag in All in one seo configuration. It is set to “false”. Not sure what to set it to. From some of the comments covos above, I think I will leave it to false. Hopefully, it won’t hurt site’s seo.

You covered the two features I was hoping to learn more about, namely the Title Attribute & Menu Label – I have been using the All In One SEO Pack for sometime now and never altered these… still a little hesitant to, but glad to understand them finally.

A very VERY useful post, thank you so much! A web designer installed this on a site for me last year and never filled anything in so i have spent the last year filling in meta info on about 600 posts!!!!!! It works though. Nice one!

Without the ability to see how you have various settings, it impossible to know the root cause. But unfortunately there are more than one place that WordPress will try to set the final URL. If you have WordPress permalinks set how you want them, that one usually wins for how URLs are displayed. However, you should also check to see how your canonical tags are being set because they will determine how Google will index you.

Jack,
Great site – I followed this post religiously. As a newbie to Web Development and responsible for our B2B website would it be fair to conclude that most businesses that need “brochureware sites” do not need to do much more SEO than this? That is most small and medium sized businesses in technical areas with around 3000 competitors around the world would do this SEO on set up and leave things alone? $500/month for ongoing SEO and maintenance seems not to be worthwhile…? Your thoughts?

Jack – your’s is the first actually helpful info I have found on filing in the blancks on AIOSEOP. I’m writing a short “How To” e-book and may I quote from your reommendations (with full attribution to you of course).

Very usefull thanks for your work, I was not prepared to pay for the support ticket and believe the author of all in one SEO is damaging his image after selling me the plugin, anyway rhanks for your help be will be checking back.

Do you know if installing more than one seo pack will make things worse or better in terms of rankings? Have one SEO pack currently, and wanted to install another instead. I don’t want to lose all of the work I’ve done on my previous seo pack though… thoughts?

Jack,
There is something wrong with my site. The Canonical checkbox ends up putting the exact same URL in each post – my estore (shopp) page. My settings are set correctly for WordPress URL and Site URL (settings).

For now I have unchecked Canonical to hide the problem, but I get that it’s an important feature and want to re-enable it. Any idea what I need to fix?

Can you please explain further what this quote from your table, row Dynamically Generate Keywords for Posts Page.

If you have changed the default setting of WordPress and the listing of of your posts is somewhere other than your default/home page then this option determines if you want the keywords for that page set dynamically (based on all the posts listed) or if they should be manually entered. I suggest you do it manually.

I have to agree with you Jack in reply to Gordons’ question… I definitely wouldn’t be using anything that forces the natural SEO path.

All in one SEO plugin is the best seo tool combined with fresh quality content should do the trick.

If your not that accomplished at writing keyword rich content I would also recommend SEO Pressor. This is a quality WP plugin that guides you through the post writing process and lets you know if you have enough keywords, tags etc.

Great post!

Sandy

224

webstar //

this seo pack is really help to more traffic to the blog

225

ajeet //

Thanks for the great post :)

226

seo //

Thanks, I’ve been searching for details about this subject for ages and yours is the best I have found so far.

Thanks for this post, Jack, very informative. It’s true that that there are so many articles on which plugins to use, but not so many that say how to use them properly.

I really appreciate the well-thought-out layout and clear information.

I do wonder, though, with the new “over-optimization” penalty potentially coming from Google, if the post title format of “Post Title | Blog Title” could harm rankings for spammy-looking titles. Time will tell on that one.

Hi,
Have found this very helpful. I was hoping someone could give me some further help on the ‘rewrite titles’ section. I have checked the box (as it mentions that wordpress default is anti-SEO), are the default settings on AIOSEO Pack sufficient, any advice would be great, Cheers

Great article and great tips, thanks Jack!
For more than one year, I have been trying to optimize my weblog in order to get better results (as we know, Graphic Design is very expoiled on the net).
I have been investing lots of hours improving, trying… and I started to think that Google does not index a WP site as does with all my clients Dreamweaver sites.
You just opened my eyes! the AllInOneSEOpack could be the problem… I’ll keep reading and re-reading your post, you have given me some ideas to try.
•Thanks once more!•

251

Andrew //

I’m curious about the Auto Generate Descriptions. I have this feature checked but when I publish a post, then go back to look – none of the information is auto filled in the AIOSEO box below the post?

This would really be beneficial to me, since I have a few publishers on my blog and none of them ever fill out the AIOSEO box – I can’t complain because they add so much content…but if I could get this Auto-generate Title, Description and keywords thing to work it would be great!

Andrew – the tool doesn’t fill in the box, the auto-generated content is inserted into the code when the page loads within the browser. Load your page and then view the page source, you should be able to see the completed meta description.

253

Andrew //

@Jack – I see it in the page source. Thanks for the info!! Much appreciated

Should I leave the General WP Settings for “Site Title” blank as well as “Site Description” since those are taken care of in AIOSEO? Or should they be there and AIOSEO blank for the home page? What’s the best practice there

is all in one seo getting rid of my google authorship? I had it before and after installing All in One it is not coming up anymore. I have nothing in the google plus field of the main All in one settings, and I have it inserted in my user->your profile. When I view page source it is there. But it does not show up in the search, see:

I’m far, far from an expert on how Google Authorship work so I can’t offer any intelligent advice on that. As for why it worked before and not after, I suspect a conflict between settings somewhere either in WP itself, or another plugin. AIOSEO prefers to be the one doing the work and usually has issues if another piece of code tries to.

Hi, I am wondering if anyone else has noticed this or had this problem? The All In One SEO Pack is a great resource but I just noticed there are ads placed in the Google results. I uploaded a screen shot.

Sorry if I seem argumentative, but this is surely a hack. When you view the site with standard browser, all is fine, but if you change the user agent to google bot, then the spam content shows up on the page – that’s a hack. It’s probably a variant of the Pharma Hack.

268

K //

Hmmm, well my computer is clean, it’s scanned daily. I also contacted my hosting company and they did a scan as well and we both came up with nothing. I also researched the link you suggested and followed their steps and again did not find anything.

269

K //

I believe you something is there but so far everything has been scanned and can’t find it. Very annoying.

yoast seo is also good, It incorporates everything from a snippet preview and page analysis functionality that helps you optimize your pages content, images titles, meta descriptions and more to XML sitemaps.

Hey Jack! You saved me from heartbreak! I thought Google already penalized me with only God knows what I did wrong with my blog. But when I configured my all in one SEO correctly, lo and behold, my webpage indexes came to life. Thank you so much but I can’t thank you enough!